Presidential Commissions

11 March 2010

For a response to this article, click here; for a rejoinder to the response, here.

By Max Holland

In November 2005, The Washington Spectator published an article by this author about the publishing practices of the 9/11 Commission. “The Politics (and Profits) of Information” described how that panel skirted its obligation to publish a complete, documented, and indexed record of its investigation via the Government Printing Office, a laudable purpose achieved by every comparable probe.

“The Making of a Washington Expert,” a sidebar to the Spectator article, described how the Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, arranged for an associate from the University of Virginia, Tim Naftali, to write a history of US counterterrorism policy—even though Naftali had no expertise or background in the subject. In the end, the monograph Naftali belatedly delivered as a consultant was deemed unsuitable for publication as a Commission document. That did not stop Naftali, however, from advertising himself subsequently as the Commission’s“official historian.”

When HNN posted the sidebar, Naftali wrote a response taking issue with the Spectator article, which, he claimed, relied on “unnamed sources, untruths and half-truths.”

At the time, the internal papers of the 9/11 Commission were not yet publicly available. That began to change on January 14, 2009, when the National Archives released the first tranche of Commission records. To date, approximately 35 percent of the panel’s archives have been opened. Among them are many documents that flesh out the story of Naftali’s consultancy.

The story is more complicated than was previously reported. Tensions between Naftali and the Commission’s “Front Office” surfaced well before he submitted his monograph. More importantly, the Commission was unaware that Naftali already had a contract to write a trade book on counterterrorism, and that it would be subsidizing him.

Naftali’s self-aggrandizement at taxpayers’ expense might be a forgotten matter, except that he is now on the public payroll, and has been since 2006 as director of the Nixon presidential archives. A future issue of Washington Decoded will examine Naftali’s increasingly troubled and controversial tenure at the Nixon Library.

The idea for a historical monograph on US counterterrorism policy arose during a meeting of the commissioners on May 21, 2003, some five months after they had begun their inquiry. Former Navy Secretary John Lehman, perhaps the most conservative member of the panel, opined that the proposed work plan of Team 3, which was analyzing US counterterrorism policy, appeared to be “framed too narrowly.” He wanted the final report to include a narrative about US policy that harked back to at least 1983, when Hizbollah militants destroyed a Marine barracks in Beirut.[1]

Philip Zelikow, the Commission’s executive director, cautioned against an expansion. The Commission should not lose its focus: there was “full strategic warning” after August 1998 (when al-Qaeda bombed US embassies in Africa), Zelikow said, and the issues were clear from that point forward until the “fall of the buildings.” This “core policy story” had to be told in an authoritative way, without getting bogged down in pre-history.[2]

The idea of a separate monograph began percolating, however, because it seemed to make sense to frame, in historical perspective, what policymakers did (or did not do) from 1998 to 2001. Were the choices Washington made over those three years a too-conditioned reflex, a function of how policymakers had responded to terrorism during the previous 25 years?

30 January 2008

In a revelation bound to cast a pall over the 9/11 Commission, Philip Shenon will report in a forthcoming book that the panel’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, engaged in “surreptitious” communications with presidential adviser Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials during the commission’s 20-month investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

Shenon, who led The New York Times’ coverage of the 9/11 panel, reveals the Zelikow-Rove connection in a new book entitled The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, to be published next month by TWELVE books. The Commission is under an embargo until its February 5 publication, but Washington Decoded managed to purchase a copy of the abridged audio version from a New York bookstore.

In what’s termed an “investigation of the investigation,” Shenon purports to tell the story of the commission from start to finish. The book’s critical revelations, however, revolve almost entirely around the figure of Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs prior to his service as the commission’s executive director. Shenon delivers a blistering account of Zelikow’s role and leadership, and an implicit criticism of the commissioners for appointing Zelikow in the first place—and then allowing him to stay on after his myriad conflicts-of-interest were revealed under oath.

Shenon’s narrative is built from extensive interviews with staff members and several, if not all, the commissioners. He depicts Zelikow as exploiting his central position to negate or neutralize criticism of the Bush administration so that the White House would not bear, in November 2004, the political burden of failing to prevent the attacks.

The Commission includes these specific revelations:

• Kean and Hamilton appreciated that Zelikow was a friend and former colleague of then-national security adviser Condoleeza Rice, one of the principal officials whose conduct would be scrutinized. Zelikow had served with her on the National Security Council (NSC) during the presidency of Bush’s father, and they had written a book together about German reunification. The commission co-chairmen also knew of Zelikow’s October 2001 appointment to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. According to Shenon, however, Zelikow failed to disclose several additional and egregious conflicts-of-interest, among them, the fact that he had been a member of Rice’s NSC transition team in 2000-01. In that capacity, Zelikow had been the “architect” responsible for demoting Richard Clarke and his counter-terrorism team within the NSC. As Shenon puts it, Zelikow “had laid the groundwork for much of went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know that?”

• Karen Heitkotter, the commission’s executive secretary, was taken aback on June 23, 2003 when she answered the telephone for Zelikow at 4:40 PM and heard a voice intone, “This is Karl Rove. I’m looking for Philip.” Heitkotter knew that Zelikow had promised the commissioners he would cut off all contact with senior officials in the Bush administration. Nonetheless, she gave Zelikow’s cell phone number to Rove. The next day there was another call from Rove at 11:35 AM. Subsequently, Zelikow would claim that these calls pertained to his “old job” at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

• The full extent of Zelikow’s involvement with the incumbent administration only became evident within the commission on October 8, 2003, almost halfway into the panel’s term. Determined to blunt the Jersey Girls’ call for his resignation or recusal, Zelikow proposed that he be questioned under oath about his activities. General counsel Daniel Marcus, who conducted the sworn interview, brought a copy of the résumé Zelikow had provided to Kean and Hamilton. None of the activities Zelikow now detailed—his role on Rice’s transition team, his instrumental role in Clarke’s demotion, his authorship of a post-9/11 pre-emptive attack doctrine—were mentioned in the résumé. Zelikow blandly asserted to Marcus that he did not see “any of this as a major conflict of interest.” Marcus’s conclusion was that Zelikow “should never have been hired” as executive director. But the only upshot from these shocking disclosures was that Zelikow was involuntarily recused from that part of the investigation which involved the presidential transition, and barred from participating in subsequent interviews of senior Bush administration officials.

• Some two months later, as Bob Kerrey replaced disgruntled ex-Senator Max Cleland on the panel, the former Nebraska senator became astounded once he understood Zelikow’s obvious conflicts-of-interest and his very limited recusal. Kerrey could not understand how Kean and Hamilton had ever agreed to put Zelikow in charge. “Look Tom,” Kerrey told Kean, “either he goes or I go.” But Kean persuaded Kerrey to drop his ultimatum.

• In late 2003, around the time his involuntary recusal was imposed, Zelikow called executive secretary Karen Heitkotter into his office and ordered her to stop creating records of his incoming telephone calls. Concerned that the order was improper, a nervous Heitkotter soon told general counsel Marcus. He advised her to ignore Zelikow’s order and continue to keep a log of his telephone calls, insofar as she knew about them.

• Although Shenon could not obtain from the GAO an unredacted record of Zelikow’s cell phone use—and Zelikow used his cell phone for most of his outgoing calls—the Times reporter was able to establish that Zelikow made numerous calls to “456” numbers in the 202 area code, which is the exclusive prefix of the White House.

• Even after his recusal, Zelikow continued to insert himself into the work of “Team 3,” the task force responsible for the most politically-sensitive part of the investigation, counter-terrorism policy. This brief encompassed the White House, which meant investigating the conduct of Condoleeza Rice and Richard Clarke during the months prior to 9/11. Team 3 staffers would come to believe that Zelikow prevented them from submitting a report that would have depicted Rice’s performance as “amount[ing] to incompetence, or something not far from it.”

In Without Precedent, Kean and Hamilton’s 2006 account of the 9/11 panel, the two co-chairmen wrote that Zelikow was a controversial choice

. . . [but] we had full confidence in Zelikow’s independence and ability—and frankly, we wanted somebody who was unafraid to roil the waters from time to time. He recused himself from anything involving his work on the NSC transition. He made clear his determination to conduct an aggressive investigation. And he was above all a historian dedicated to a full airing of the facts. It was clear from people who knew and worked with him that Zelikow would not lead a staff inquiry that did anything less than uncover the most detailed and accurate history of 9/11.

Shenon’s radically different account of the commission’s inner workings promises to achieve what none of the crackpot conspiracy theorists have managed to do so far: put the 9/11 Commission in disrepute.

The Commission will be reviewed in the February issue of Washington Decoded.

20 April 2007

The commission that investigated the events of 9/11 has been
highly praised and sharply criticized, but one aspect of its task has
virtually escaped notice: its responsibility to leave behind a
complete, lasting, and easily accessible public record of its
investigation. For all the good work that the panel did, some of its
decisions have eroded the public’s right and ability to understand what
happened on September 11, 2001.

Raising this issue may seem a quibble, given that the 9/11 Report
is one of the best-selling government documents of all time. But
history shows that reports of comparable magnitude, and the first
reaction to these reports, have been inexorably colored by exigencies
of the day. Time has a way of changing initial public opinion. Indeed,
one media flap (like the still-unresolved questions about the
Pentagon’s ABLE DANGER data-mining program), can destroy a commission’s
carefully cultivated reputation in a matter of days. Consequently, the
true measure of such investigations is not just their final reports or
recommendations. These panels are ultimately judged on the totality of
information they bring into the public realm; what they make knowable,
in other words.

Traditionally, this deeper purpose has meant that final
reports of important commissions have been supplemented by publication
of the public and private hearings, staff reports and the actual
documents
used to compile the findings. Take a look at the shelf space occupied
by some major probes since 1945: these include the 1946 congressional
inquiry into the Pearl Harbor attack (40 volumes); the 1964 Warren
Commission investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination (27); and
the 1975-76 Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies
(15).

By contrast, the 9/11 Commission climaxed in the publication
of a single, 567-page volume—without an index. The relative poverty of
this effort at the culmination of a twenty-month, $14 million
investigation reflects a downward trend in the government’s obligation
to disseminate information to the public. This policy began in the
1980s, when, for ideological reasons, the Reagan administration reduced
the number and availability of government publications. The worrisome
tendency has accelerated with the advent of the Internet.

Much of this story concerns the US Government Printing
Office (GPO), whose lineage as the principal agent
for delivering public information goes back to 1860. “Keeping America
Informed” is the GPO’s motto, and over the years its imprimatur has
acquired symbolic and legal significance. The sober look of a GPO
volume conveys weight and authenticity. The symbolism is embedded in
the law as well. The US Code still states that “all [federal]
printing . . . shall be done at the Government Printing Office.”

The 9/11 Commission’s first departure from customary practice
was its decision not to use the GPO. On May 19, 2004, the commission
announced that W.W. Norton, a private New York publisher, would publish
the “authorized edition” of its final report. According to the
commission’s press release, Norton was selected based on the criteria “affordability, accuracy, availability, and longevity.” There was no
mention of a role for the GPO, which had long done a sterling job by
these standards.

30 March 2007

Although attention largely focused on the solemn ceremonies, the most remarkable feature of the events marking the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks may have been the 9/11 Commission's reversion to its repressed partisanship.

The precipitating factor was the seal of approval Thomas Kean bestowed on a controversial ABC miniseries that tended to ascribe a larger portion of the blame for 9/11 to the Clinton administration (although, in truth, the Bush administration did not go unscathed). Kean, a Republican former governor who chaired the commission, had been instrumental in keeping the panel on a more or less bipartisan page. But the price of unity had always been that everyone within sight was described as in some way to blame, which is another way of finding that no one was. The docudrama strove to accomplish the opposite. Thus, Kean's endorsement of The Path to 9/11 as "true to the spirit" of what had happened was tantamount to tearing up an agreed-upon script, a provocative thing to do just weeks before a national election. Some of his former Democratic colleagues responded in kind.

Generating an aura of political bipartisanship had never been easy. In April 2004, during the public-hearings phase of its investigation, the panel gave every sign of becoming unhinged, with the sessions in Washington coming to resemble an intensely combative congressional investigation. Democratic members sought to pin the lion's share of responsibility for 9/11 onto the Bush administration because it had ostensibly disregarded an ample warning. Republicans countered by depicting a Clinton administration that had vacillated after U.S. embassies and the USS Cole burned.

Under increasing criticism, the commission managed to close ranks, and in July 2004 it delivered a report that was an instant and widely praised best-seller. The government's subsequent, and massive, reorganization of the intelligence community, instigated in part by the report, also burnished the commission's image.

In the two years since the report's publication, some of the sheen has worn off, as it has become apparent that to achieve unanimity the commission took a bipartisan dive. The report is compelling when the subject is Al Qaeda and its plot. But whenever the issue is how Washington let that plot be carried out, the historical analysis is underwhelming. The narrative reads like "an elephant rolling a pea," as a review by Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist, put it. "Especially disturbing [was] the inability of the commission—or, more likely . . . its unwillingness—to assign any blame among intelligence managers or policymakers." The only thing worse than this lack of accountability was the commission's decision to deny the public access to the information it had assiduously collected from government files. This barring of access insures that the panel's non-interpretation will reign supreme until at least January 2009.

22 December 2004

Three of this nation’s worst catastrophes--the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 9/11 terrorist acts--have all been investigated by special federal commissions, with decidedly mixed results.

It is extraordinarily difficult for the federal government to investigate itself, which is, unavoidably, what all of these panels attempted to do. That raises the question of whether such commissions warrant the public’s trust at all, given their congenital conflicts of interest.

The President’s Commission on Pearl Harbor was, in retrospect, the most problematic of the three. Known as the Roberts Commission, after its chairman, Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts, this five-man panel was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt nine days after the December 7th Japanese surprise attack.

Justice Roberts was joined by two Army generals and two Navy admirals. The panel was handed a very narrow mandate--to determine whether there had been any “derelictions of duty or errors of judgment” by the commanding officers in Hawaii--and a very limited period in which to accomplish this task.

After five weeks of meetings, including a trip to Honolulu, the Roberts Commission issued its findings in January 1942 and, to no great surprise, identified two scapegoats. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter C. Short, the commanding officers in Hawaii, were both deemed derelict in the performance of their duties.

While neither officer was blameless, the failure to examine what had gone wrong in Washington tainted the Roberts Commission’s findings almost immediately. But there was a war to be fought, and the matter was not revisited until 1946, when a Republican-controlled Congress launched a bitterly partisan investigation. To this day, books and articles publish the false claim that Mr. Roosevelt knew about the pending Japanese attack but did nothing because he wanted America to enter the war.

The inquiry by the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, or the Warren Commission, was exhaustive in comparison to the Roberts Commission. Headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, this seven-man panel was initially expected to spend only two or three months reviewing an FBI investigation already under way into Mr. Kennedy’s killing (41 years ago today) and the subsequent shooting death of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, on November 24.

Instead, the Warren Commission sat for 10 months and effectively mounted its own, unprecedented investigation, ultimately concluding that there was no evidence of a foreign or domestic conspiracy involved in either killing.

It is all but forgotten now, but when the Warren Report was published in September 1964, it was almost universally hailed for its probity and thoroughness. The news media considered it the very model of what a dedicated commission could accomplish. This honeymoon lasted two years.

Beginning in 1966, a series of books and articles began raising questions about the Warren Commission’s procedures and findings. Some of the criticism was deserved--the Warren Report is not a letter-perfect document--but most was dishonest and unwarranted.

As one disinterested reviewer noted in the late 1960s, the best tribute to the solidity of the Warren Report was, in fact, the deviousness of its critics. Three congressional investigations in the 1970s clarified the outstanding issues, but one of those panels, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, also happened to be one of the greatest travesties ever visited on the American public by Congress. It concluded, from unreliable evidence, that President Kennedy was “probably” killed as a result of a conspiracy. Yet the Warren Commission’s core findings were not and never have been impeached. They have stood up to the most important test of all, the test of time.

The 9/11 Commission, of course, is more akin to the Roberts Commission than the panel headed by Justice Warren. There was no mystery to be solved about who was responsible for the attack. To be sure, there are some skeptics who now claim that, like Mr. Roosevelt, President Bush knew or should have known beforehand and only let the attack happen so that he could carry out a preordained foreign policy.

But in general, the 9/11 Report is enjoying a honeymoon not unlike the reception accorded the Warren Report immediately after its publication. Because there is no “whodunit,” however, the 9/11 Report is unlikely to fall into the kind of disrepute, even ridicule, that is now common whenever the Warren Report is mentioned. Yet, if history is any guide, the 9/11 Report is not the last word, nor should it be regarded as such.

Getting at the truth in Washington is arduous, and a modern-day Diogenes probably would be tempted to drop his lantern and throw up his hands. Still, even conflicted commissions play an invaluable role in what should be seen as an ongoing process.

28 September 2004

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the wounding of Texas Governor John Connally, in November 1963, have incited more debate and controversy than anyone could have imagined at the time. The notion of a conspiracy quickens the pulse, but there was none. All reliable evidence leads to the conclusion that there was one shooter acting alone.

Why then is the report of the Warren Commission – which was supposed to be the federal government’s “last word” on the assassination – so widely disbelieved, if not ridiculed? Part of the answer, to be sure, lies in what we do not know, and can never know, about Lee Harvey Oswald. He took some secrets to the grave. Yet it is also true, but not well understood, that part of the disbelief stems from the internal politics of the commission. One striking example of how politics affected, or perhaps infected, the work of the commission can be found in its description of the sequence of events in Dealey Plaza.

What Really Happened?

After the assassination, most of the spectators in Dealey Plaza – and there were upwards of four hundred people there – reported hearing three distinct shots. And initially, the FBI and Dallas police believed, based on witnesses’ testimony, that the first of the three shots wounded President Kennedy; the second wounded Governor Connally; and the third fatally hit the president in his head. But is that what happened? Could it have happened that way? For the definitive answer we must weigh the best evidence, namely, the medical/forensic reports about the wounds suffered by the two men.

The third shot, which penetrated President Kennedy’s rear skull, is the easiest to analyze. The direction of such a missile is determined by the “beveling effect” on its target. “Beveling” or “coning” always occurs on the target’s surface of exit. In this instance, when doctors at the Bethesda Naval Hospital conducted a postmortem on President Kennedy’s body, they found that the surface of exit was the interior surface of the president’s rear skull. In other words, the beveling proved that the third shot came from above and behind the president as he sat in the limousine.

The second shot is far more complicated. It is commonly known as the “magic bullet,” but there was nothing genuinely magical about it. The muzzle velocity of a bullet leaving Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle was about 2,100 feet per second. After piercing President Kennedy’s upper back it exited his throat right above the knot of his tie. At that point of exit it was traveling at 1700 feet per second. Governor Connally was sitting directly in front of the president, no more than thirty inches away. One must consider the question: If this missile did not hit Connally, where did it go? In point of fact it had to hit the Texas governor. Otherwise one is left trying to explain a high velocity bullet that disappeared altogether. Such a missile would truly have been a “magic bullet,” as opposed to one that wounded both men, which is precisely what military-style ammunition – the kind Oswald happened to use – is designed to do.

But what of the first shot, since the consensus was that three rifle retorts were heard in Dealey Plaza? The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination showed a little girl in a red dress and white coat running alongside the motorcade while the president and Mrs. Kennedy drive by. Shortly before the president is obviously wounded, this little girl stops abruptly in her tracks. When later asked why, she said she stopped because she heard a loud noise. I believe, as many other students of the subject do, that this loud noise was in fact the first shot, and that it missed the occupants of the limousine entirely.

The Warren Panel’s Investigation

The Warren Commission was established exactly one week after the assassination, and deliberated ten months before publishing its report. The key to understanding the report, and its ambiguity about such critical sequences as the shots in Dealey Plaza, lies in the relationship between the chief justice after whom the commission was named, and the other senior member of the panel, Senator Richard B. Russell (D-Georgia).

By 1963, Russell was serving his fifth term. Staunchly conservative, and an exceptionally powerful and influential senator, Russell was a reluctant member of the commission. Although as interested as anyone in finding out who was responsible for the tragedy in Dallas, his problem was Earl Warren. He did not respect Warren and did not want to serve with him, even on such an important mission. Warren’s remarks immediately after the assassination typified why Russell so disliked Warren. About forty minutes after the news was broadcast, Warren held a press conference at the Supreme Court. The chief justice ascribed the murder to “hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of the nation by bigots.” At the time, “bigots” was often used as a code word for southerners. Then, to compound matters, Warren repeated his preferred formulations when he gave a eulogy for President Kennedy on November 24th. For Senator Russell, this “rush to judgment” was all too typical of Warren’s liberal jurisprudence and all the more grating because the alleged assassin was in fact a self-described “Marxist-Leninist” and not a “bigot” at all.

Why did President Lyndon Johnson want Richard Russell on the commission? Immediately after the president was killed, and especially after the vigilante slaying of the alleged assassin two days later, passions were running dangerously high in the country. There were two schools of thought. One held that because the assassination occurred in Dallas, a city known for its opposition to President Kennedy, extreme right-wingers simply had to be behind Lee Harvey Oswald. The ex-marine had been framed in order to allow the real killers to go free. In contrast, persons of a more conservative bent asserted that since Oswald was an avowed Marxist-Leninist with links to Cuba and the Soviet Union, a secret communist agency had to have been responsible.

In this situation, President Johnson believed that if he could get both Earl Warren and Richard Russell to serve jointly, ninety percent of responsible opinion in the United States would be satisfied with any conclusion that these two men endorsed. To their respective constituencies, Warren and Russell represented everything that was virtuous and respectable.

For three days last month about 250 conspiracy buffs met in Washington to observe the 30th anniversary of their reverse Bible – the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Speakers at the meeting referred to what they believe is the non-defining, if not deliberately misleading, document on that tragedy as “The Warren Omission.”

The “Three Decades of Doubt” conference convened by the Coalition on Presidential Assassinations, or COPA, a recent alliance of several smaller groups, brought together a virtual Who’s Who of the “JFK research community,” as they prefer to call themselves.

It included such students of alleged conspiracies as Gary Aguilar, a practicing ophthalmologist who takes exception to the official interpretation of the JFK autopsy; James DiEugenio, a writer billed as the “reigning authority on the New Orleans aspects of the case”; Robert Groden, a consultant to Oliver Stone and author of a book of photographs that allegedly expose the cover-up; Mark Lane, a Washington lawyer who pioneered conspiratorialism; Jim Marrs, an author and Stone consultant who has recently become intrigued with the possible multiple identities of Lee Harvey Oswald; John Newman, a retired Army major who advances the thesis that JFK was murdered, in part, because he wanted to end the Vietnam war and abandon South Vietnam; David Scheim, a mathematician at the National Institutes of Health who believes the Mafia did it; and Peter Dale Scott, an English professor at Berkeley who argues, in Deep Politics, that the assassination was “the product of ongoing relationships and processes within the deep American political process.”

What is this deep process? It is a political wonderland linking the CIA, the FBI, drug dealers, Anastasio Somoza and Oliver North, among others – as Scott details in just two pages of his book.

Ordinary citizens came to the conference, too, paying a convention registration fee of $150. But the meeting was far from a gathering of the conspiracy-consumed John and Jane Does. Many fervent conspiracists are highly educated people – physicians, diplomats, lawyers, and PhD’s. Given the variety of their views, it was striking to observe their comity and the courtesies they extended to each other. In some haughtier academic settings, scholars who present such wildly incompatible views often go for each other’s throats, flinging aspersions and ridicule. Here there was respect and democracy with a small “d.” All conspiracy buffs were given equal time.

The real heretics are always elsewhere. They are everyone who does not believe in an assassination conspiracy theory. To fully appreciate this phenomenon it helps to recall a classic lecture given by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter in 1963. The earmarks of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter said then, were “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

While the paranoid style is not exclusively an American phenomenon, it is an old and recurring reaction here to sweeping social change, economic disorder and national traumas. It surfaced in the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s, in the anti-Catholicism of the 1850s, among some Populists at the turn of the century, with Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and more recently in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “immense conspiracy” of the 1950s. The conference in Washington confirmed that while the Kennedy conspiracy choir has a few members on the far right, the majority hold liberal or leftish political views. Several spoke of “an enslaved nation” that has “lost control of its government” and “lost its nationhood.”

Dashed Dreams

In the aftermath of Kennedy’s death, the advocacy of conspiracy across the liberal political spectrum may be traceable to immediate post-assassination myths. Even though President Kennedy was cautious domestically and, in foreign policy, was a militant cold-warrior, the myth of Camelot made him in death a martyr of liberal causes at home and abroad. A sense of political dispossession still drives many liberal conspiracy buffs. For them, it is as if every wrong in America for three decades is attributable to a future that died in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The COPA conference had its share of the absurd. During an hourlong “breakout” panel entitled “Whodunit?” an unsuspecting hotel guest who detoured into the meeting room might have thought it was a rehearsal for a Saturday Night Live skit about Sotheby’s auction house. Conspiracy buffs were outbidding each other.

“Whodunit?” the chairman asked, and his audience responded energetically with more and more dazzlingly competing suspects: the Federal Reserve banks and Wall Street because an independently wealthy Jack Kennedy was challenging the capitalist system; the Israelis (no reason given); the local police because Dallas was a font of right-wing hatred; H.L. Hunt, the right-wing Texas oil millionaire; the KGB; pro-Castro Cubans; anti-Castro Cubans; and/or the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. There was a conspiracy for every contingency.

To judge from the steadfast attendance at the larger plenary sessions of this non-stop, three-day conference, the conspiracy movement has never been stronger. For two days running, in the huge, top-of-the-line Washington Sheraton Hotel, the sessions went from 8:30 AM to 10 PM. Books, newsletters, organizational advertisements and JFK paraphernalia were widely on sale.

And to the great satisfaction of the conspiracy buffs, public opinion polls seem to confirm their growing strength and ardor. Speakers repeatedly cited polls asserting that “90 percent of the public” believes that there was some kind of conspiracy to kill JFK and that its lurking mystery saps American confidence. One of the most popular handouts at the conference was a page copied from Kevin Phillips’s new book, Arrogant Capital, with a graph showing Americans’ trust in Washington starting a headlong plunge in 1964.

Getting Recognition

As recently as 1991 the movement to prove a conspiracy was getting nowhere. Rebuffed in their efforts to gain access to classified government files, conspiracy theorists were endlessly analyzing the same old information. Then, while motion picture director Oliver Stone was filming the movie JFK, a conspiracy buff wrote Stone a letter reminding him that the records of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which in 1979 re-investigated both the assassination and the Warren Commission’s work on it, were sealed until 2029.

According to Jim Lesar, head of a group called the Assassination Archives Research Center, that information prompted Stone to insert a tag line at the end of his film demanding that all government files be opened. A blizzard of letters from moviegoers fell on Washington, and in 1992 Congress passed an extraordinary statute in hopes of alleviating public suspicion about the federal government’s response to the Kennedy assassination.

The law instructed the National Archives to gather all assassination-related records into a single massive collection, open to the public with the latest high-tech retrieval aids. It established guidelines for the release of federal records that are among the most liberal in existence today. Thanks to Hollywood, conspiracy buffs now stand on the verge of their biggest archival bonanza, and the assassination research community is re-energized.

A high point of the COPA conference came on its last day when two officials from the JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), the panel newly commissioned by Congress to oversee and compel the release of assassination records, addressed the audience. John Tunheim, the ARRB chairman, stressed the board’s independence from intragovernment interference. Tunheim and David Marwell, an experienced archivist who is the board’s executive director, answered questions for another half hour. The legislation creating the ARRB guarantees it a life span of only two years, but if need be, the board itself can extend its existence for another year, to October 1997. Tunheim said it probably will do that. The board’s presumption will always be in favor of immediate disclosure, Tunheim also said.

The COPA conference was almost totally ignored by the press. But the presence of the two ARRB officials was proof that the assassination research community is finally being taken seriously. The gathering ended with a three-hour open hearing during which the full board took formal and stenographically recorded testimony from all who asked to appear. (The board announced its second formal hearing, scheduled for November 18 in Dallas at the Earle Cabell Federal Building.)

It is easy to foresee future controversy, though. Several critics cited the disclosure law’s exemption of the JFK autopsy records from forced public release. At the Kennedy family’s insistence, the ARRB is not empowered by law to require the release of them. Suspicions may persist. And one witness warned the board to watch out for self-servingly forged government documents – newly released as genuine antiques. Because the board’s mandate expires in 1997, questioners also asked how the panel could pry loose documents proving CIA or FBI complicity when “all the agencies need to do is stonewall for another three years.”

It is easy to make fun of the conspiracy buffs. But they are responsible for legislation that is on the verge of accomplishing something important. The truth that will eventually emerge from the secret records is that the assassination and its subsequent investigations are misunderstood because they have been persistently divorced from their context. Once history is restored to the terrible events that began on November 22, 1963, they will cease to seem an unfathomably continuing conspiratorial evil. They will be seen instead as another bitter consequence of the Cold War.

The Cold War Chill

Although nearly every researcher looking at newly released documents will be trying to find new clues to an ostensible cover-up by the FBI, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Warren Commission or all of them, the genuine story waiting to be discerned is that Cold War considerations drove and sometimes bent the first and subsequent investigations of the JFK assassination.

These investigations pitted the government against itself. They cut across the entire national security apparatus. In the clashes that ensued between the Warren Commission, for example, and Cold War establishments like the CIA, the latter agencies always won. Cold War dictates overrode the official search for answers because the national trauma of the assassination could not be allowed to add new tensions to the 45-year East-West struggle or disclose covert activities against the Communist bloc. For example, the CIA argued that if specific evidence of no Soviet involvement in the Kennedy assassination – which was quickly available – were to be made public, it would compromise intelligence sources and methods.

So Cold War secrets were kept. They could be kept because they did not change the essential finding that Oswald did it, and he did it alone.

If public doubts about the assassination and its aftermath now begin to subside, and if suspicions about the motives of a heinous government cover-up are reduced, perhaps we can finally hold the only debate about the assassination worth having. It is the one that has always been lacking. It is about full disclosure in a democratic society.

In the 1960s, the CIA was obligated to tell the Warren Commission – not to mention the American people – about its clandestine efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro, including its proposed assassination plots. That was one big secret held back in 1964. If the word “conspiracy” must be uttered in the same breath with the Kennedy assassination, then the conspiracy that existed then was a conspiracy of silence designed to keep secret the US government’s covert actions against Castro.

The CIA had every reason to be concerned about a no-holds-barred investigation of the events of November 22 that went beyond a criminal inquiry. The exposure of its anti-Castro operations would have had predictable consequences, including a propaganda windfall for the Communist bloc that would have lasted for years and strong condemnations by the international community, plus an intense investigation of the CIA and officials of two administrations who had directed the anti-Castro efforts.

It was surely not President Lyndon Johnson’s intention to exacerbate Cold War intrigues when he announced the Warren Commission’s formation. Indeed, his intention was the opposite: to cool fervently anti-Soviet rhetoric in Congress that might heighten East-West fears of nuclear attack.

Even if there was a risk that condemnation of the Warren Commission’s report would follow if the information being withheld leaked out, there was deemed to be no contest between damaging the commission’s reputation by limiting its scope and raising Cold War risks by allowing full disclosure.

Former President Gerald Ford, a member of the Warren Commission, explained in a recent interview that government officials believed that Cold War exigencies gave them the right to withhold the truth, in whole or part, to protect national security. No complete federal investigation of the Kennedy assassination could be conducted publicly in the political pressure vessel of the Cold War. It is naïve to believe otherwise. Yet Americans believe that secrecy per se poisons official verdicts.

Ultimately, whether or not the rationing of the truth to protect “national security” was an all too common and outrageous act during the 45-year-long Cold War struggle depends on one’s perspective. There is no doubt that it was done. Some secrets were shared with the commission but not made public. No doubt referring to US communications intercepts, Chief Justice Earl Warren told the press shortly after publication of the report bearing his name that there were “things that will not be revealed in our lifetime.”

As former President Ford now acknowledges, “[T]oday, with the totally different atmosphere, those judgments might seem improper . . . [But] it was inappropriate in the atmosphere of [1964] to divulge” certain information.

It is now argued passionately that this holding back of some truths was one of the greatest misjudgments in American history because the enduring controversies about the assassination have helped foster deep alienation and a loss of respect among the American people for their government. When all, or most, of the secrets become known, that cynicism, ironically, may be the most lasting wound inflicted by Lee Harvey Oswald.

In September 1994, after doggedly repeating a white lie for forty-seven years, the Air Force finally admitted the truth about a mysterious 1947 crash in the New Mexico desert. The debris was not a weather balloon after all but wreckage from Project MOGUL, a top-secret high-altitude balloon system for detecting the first Soviet nuclear blasts halfway across the globe.

During the half-century interim, flying-saucer buffs and conspiracy theorists had adorned the incident with mythic significance, weaving wisps of evidence and contradictions in the Air Force’s account into fantastic theories: Bodies of extraterrestrial beings had been recovered by the Air Force; the government was hiding live aliens; death threats had been issued to keep knowledgeable people from talking. Such fictions had provided grist for scores of books, articles, and television shows.

In retrospect the Air Force had obviously thought the Cold War prevented it from revealing a project that remained sensitive long after the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. And such surreptitiousness was certainly not isolated. Might it provide a model even for understanding that greatest alleged government cover-up, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Indeed our understanding of the assassination and its aftermath may, like so much else, have been clouded by Cold War exigencies. It may be that the suppression of a few embarrassing but not central truths encouraged the spread of myriad far-fetched theories.

Admittedly there are Americans who prefer to believe in conspiracies and cover-ups in any situation. H.L. Mencken noted the “virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation” in 1917, and more than a century after the Lincoln assassination skeptics were still seeking to exhume John Wilkes Booth’s remains. The Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter definitively described this syndrome in his classic 1963 lecture “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” later published as an essay. “Heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” are almost as old as the Republic, Hostadter observed, as evinced by the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s, the anti-Catholicism of the 1850s, claims about the international banking cartel in the early 1900s, and Sen. Joe McCarthy’s “immense conspiracy” of the 1950s. But a recurring syndrome is not to be confused with a constant one, Hofstadter argued. Paranoia fluctuates according to the rate of change sweeping through society, and varies with affluence and education.

In the case of the Kennedy assassination, unprecedented belief in all kinds of nonsense, coupled with extraordinary disrespect for the Warren Commission, has waxed in good times and bad and flourishes among remarkable numbers of otherwise sober-minded people. Even the highest level of education is not a barrier, to judge from the disregard for the Warren Report that exists in the upper reaches of the academy. In April 1992 the professional historians’ most prestigious publication, the American Historical Review, published two articles (out of three) in praise of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. The lead piece actually asserted that “on the complex question of the Kennedy assassination itself, the film holds its own against the Warren Report.” In a similar vein, in 1993, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by an English professor named Peter Dale Scott, a book conjuring up fantastic paranoid explanations, was published by not less respected an institution than the University of California Press.

The Warren Commission’s inquiry occurred at what we now know was the height of the Cold War, and it must be judged in that context. Perhaps with its history understood, the Warren Commission, instead of being an object of derision, can emerge in a different light, battered somewhat but with the essential integrity of its criminal investigation unscathed. The terrible events that began in Dallas are not an overwhelming, unfathomable crossroads; they are another chapter in the history of the Cold War.

In September 1964, when seven lawyers filed into Lyndon Johnson’s White House to deliver their 888-page report on the most searing national event since the attack on Pearl Harbor, the transmogrification of the commission into a national joke would have seemed impossible. Collectively the commission represented one hundred and fifty years’ experience – at virtually every level of American government, from county judge to director of Central Intelligence. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s reputation was nearly impeccable after more than twenty-five years of public service, and the influence of Georgia’s senator Richard Russell in Washington, so the cliché went, was exceeded only by the president’s, given Russell’s power over intelligence matters, the armed forces, and the Senate itself. Two other panel members, Allen W. Dulles and John J. McCloy, were singularly well versed in the most sensitive national matters, Dulles having served as CIA director from 1953 to 1961 and McCloy as an assistant secretary of war from 1940 to 1945.

For several months the commission appeared to have accomplished its mission of assuring the public that the truth was known about Kennedy’s death. The American people seemed to accept that JFK’s sole assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald, and the report won almost universal praise from the news media. Prior to its release, a Gallup poll found that only 29 percent of Americans thought Oswald had acted alone, afterward 87 percent believed so.

Long before the report came out, of course, nearly everyone had his or her own explanation for the events in Dallas. It was natural to try to invest the tragedy with meaning. And humans being what they are, individual biases determined people’s theories. Even as the President was being wheeled into Parkland Memorial Hospital, anguished aides insisted that unspecified right-wingers were responsible, since uppermost in their minds was the rough reception Adlai Stevenson had gotten in Dallas a few weeks earlier, when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was booed, jostled, and spat on by right-wing demonstrators. Dallas’s long-time reputation as the “Southwest hate capital of Dixie” only reinforced liberals’ inclination to blame “refined Nazis.” Even Chief Justice Earl Warren, before his appointment to the commission, could not resist issuing a “blunt indictment of the apostles of hate.”

But for officials whose instincts were honed by national-security considerations, the Soviet-American rivalry loomed over what had happened and dictated what immediately needed to be done. The overwhelming instant reaction among these officials was to suspect a grab for power, a foreign, Communist-directed conspiracy aimed at overthrowing the U.S. government. The assassination might be the first in a concerted series of attacks on U.S. leaders or the prelude to an all-out attack. Newly installed intercontinental ballistic missiles were capable of reaching their targets in fifteen minutes; whose finger was on the nuclear button now that the president was dead? Both the president and the vice president had traveled to Dallas, and the fact that six senior cabinet members happened to be aboard an airplane headed for Japan suddenly acquired an awful significance. The Washington-area telephone system suffered a breakdown thirty minutes after the shots were fired, and sabotage was suspected. Attention fixed on the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba as the only governments that could possibly undertake and benefit from such a heinous plot.

When Major General Chester Clifton, JFK’s military aide, arrived at Parkland Hospital, he immediately called the National Military Command Center and then switched to the White House Situation Room to find out if there was any intelligence about a plot to overthrow the government. The Defense Department subsequently issued a flash warning to every U.S. military base in the world and ordered additional strategic bombers into the air. General Maxwell Taylor issued a special alert to all troops in the Washington area, while John McCone, director of central intelligence, asked the Watch Committee to convene immediately at the Pentagon. The committee, an interdepartmental group organized to prevent future Pearl Harbors, consisted of the government’s best experts on surprise military attacks.

Back in Dallas, Rufus Youngblood, head of Johnson’s Secret Service detail, told the president-to-be, “We don’t know what type of conspiracy this is, or who else is marked. The only place we can be sure you are safe is Washington.” A compliant LBJ slouched below the windows in an unmarked car on the way to Love Field, where Air Force One was waiting. Despite special security precautions, it seemed possible to those on the tarmac that the presidential jet could be raked by machine-gun fire at any moment. When the plane was finally airborne, it flew unusually high on a zigzag course back to Washington, with fighter pilots poised to intercept hostile aircraft. During the flight, Johnson kept in touch with the Situation Room, manned by the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, for any sign that the Communist bloc might be exploiting the situation. Waiting for Johnson at Andrews Air Force Base was JFK’s national security team – or as much of it as could be assembled.

As minutes and then hours passed uneventfully and overburdened telephone exchanges began working again, fears about a surprise attack receded. Conspiracies like the one being imagined rely on surprise and speed for success, and nothing suspicious had occurred after the assassination. Very soon the thought of a master plot seemed irrational, as William Manchester records in The Death of a President: “Hindsight began early. Within the next three hours most of those who had considered the possibility began trying to forget it. They felt that they had been absurd.” Still, for hours the U.S. military stood poised to deliver an overwhelming counterstrike.

Within hours the Dallas police arrested a 24-year-old Communist sympathizer named Lee Oswald, a bundle of possibilities and seeming contradictions. Now many liberals showed a reluctance to shift the blame from right-wingers to a self-styled Marxist; a liberal president being assassinated by a Marxist seemed to make no sense. Jacqueline Kennedy’s reaction upon being told of Oswald’s background was to feel sickened because she immediately sensed it robbed JFK’s death of a greater meaning. “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights,” she said, according to Manchester. “It’s – it had to be some silly little Communist.”

For security-conscious officials, however, Oswald’s arrest meant replacing one Cold War scenario with another, and the second script filled them with no less dread than the first. Undersecretary of State George Ball ordered a search of federal files as soon as the networks broadcast Oswald’s capture. Dallas authorities found pro-Soviet and pro-Castro literature in Oswald’s boardinghouse room, and frantic searches of FBI, CIA, and State Department records revealed Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union, his recent contacts with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, and his one-man Fair Play for Cuba committee in New Orleans. Top officials working through the night to assemble all the pieces had to wonder if the KGB had transformed a onetime defector into an assassin or if Castro had used an overt sympathizer to retaliate against an administration plotting his downfall. As Ball told The Washington Post in 1993, “we were just scared to death that this was something bigger than just the act of a madman.”

Conspiracy theories are rampant these days. Allegations of government involvement supposedly explain everything from the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the downing of TWA Flight 800. Given this atmosphere, it will take a generation or two for most Americans to appreciate the raw historical data now becoming available on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which remains the main melodrama of conspiracy theorists.

Taken together, the government records being assembled and made public by the five-member JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) paint a sobering portrait of the federal government. It’s not the idealized version depicted in civics textbooks or the demonized version featured on talk radio. It’s the real federal government – imperfect, plodding, riven by distrust and rivalries, compartmentalized by secrecy, working at cross-purposes or in ignorance, simultaneously guided by elevated national concerns and the most banal of bureaucratic instincts. But it does struggle to do the right thing. The Warren Commission, though established to determine the facts about a heinous crime, was at the same time a window on the vast, clanking machinery of the government.

It is government not as the American people are accustomed to seeing and hearing about it, but as it really worked in 1963 – and, in many respects, the way it still works today. Despite shortcomings and conflicts, the government did not violate its sacred duty to tell Americans the truth about who murdered the 35th President of the United States.

Although it is almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media, a fabulously rich record is being laid bare under the terms of the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992, by the panel charged with carrying out the provisions of that law.
Now in its third year of operation, the ARRB is asking Congress for another year and an additional $1.6 million. The funds ought to be appropriated. The board is an unprecedented and unheralded success.

The ARRB’s job is to pull back the shroud covering literally thousands of government records on the November 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. These documents run the gamut from the obvious (FBI and CIA files) to the obscure (records from the Social Security Administration and Army Corps of Engineers). A succession of local, state, and federal investigations of the assassination has generated a mountain of documents, many of them classified “Secret,” “Top Secret,” and higher.

The national government’s conclusion has long been that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired all the shots that killed the President, and that Oswald, in turn, was murdered by a vigilante named Jack Ruby. The ARRB is not specifically charged with re-investigating the events in Dallas. But nothing the ARRB has turned up alters these findings by one iota. Through the panel’s efforts, all Americans will have access to millions of pages of records relevant to the government’s conclusion.

The ARRB’s efforts have resulted in the declassification of thousands of records from heretofore secret FBI and CIA files; the release of the Marine Corps’s original personnel file on Oswald; and access to private papers of two key lawyers in the saga, J. Lee Rankin and Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans district attorney.

Rankin was chief counsel of the Warren Commission, and his papers show that he acted honorably in a difficult situation. Garrison’s papers reveal that he egregiously abused his prosecutorial powers. If justice had prevailed, rather than being sainted by the likes of Oliver Stone in the movie JFK, Garrison would have been sued by the Justice Department’s civil rights division for violating the rights of Clay Shaw, who was wrongfully prosecuted for an alleged role in the Kennedy assassination.

05 December 1999

Lyndon Johnson:“What’s the net of the whole thing . . . that Oswald did it, and he did it for any reason?”

Richard Russell: “Well, just that he was a general misanthropic fella [who] had never been satisfied where he was on earth, in Russia or here, and that he had a desire to get his name in history, and all.”

From his first evening as president in November 1963, until his departure from the Oval Office in January 1969, Lyndon B. Johnson secretly recorded many of his telephone conversations.

When these tape recordings began to be released in 1993 in response to the 1992 John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act, I was eager to study them for new insights about the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and its aftermath. Conspiracy buffs had put forward one theory after another, distorting virtually every primary source of information about the Kennedy assassination, often beyond recognition.

I thought that the LBJ tapes bearing on the assassination would escape this fate because they would be widely accessible and easily understandable. In retrospect, that was extremely naïve.

Listening Closely

One of the clearest examples of how the recorded information has been misrepresented can be found in Michael Beschloss’s 1997 book, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964. Beschloss presented a very important conversation between President Johnson and Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia) from the evening of Friday, September 18, 1964. Earlier that day the Warren Commission, on which Russell sat, had met for the last time to settle outstanding differences over the final draft of its written statement, known as the Warren Report.

One of Russell’s key reservations was that he did not want to rule out a conspiracy. He insisted that since the Warren Commission had not had unhindered access to the records of the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and Cuba, the Report could not state unreservedly that Lee Harvey Oswald, the Kennedy killer, had acted alone.

The commission’s other members agreed with Russell’s reservation to an extent, and ultimately the language in the final draft was modified to assuage him. As Russell spoke to explain this process to Johnson the evening of September 19, 1964, he said, “I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they’d come ‘round [and] trade me out of it by givin’ me a little old thread of it.”

Beschloss’s reading of the Russell-Johnson conversation, however, was markedly different. According toBeschloss’s transcription, Russell told the president that “I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they’d come ‘round and trade me out of it by giving me a little old threat.”